Studying Virtual Academy of Cheese Level 1 - Week 2 Review

Studying with the Virtual Academy of Cheese Level 1

Our ecommerce manager, Jen is studying for Academy of Cheese Level 1 on one of our virtual courses. Read on for her experience of the Academy of Cheese Level 1 course...

Virtual Academy of Cheese - Week 2

Week two’s cheese delivery arrived with a very strong whiff from the box – even the cat came running to investigate! Clearly bolder cheese flavours to taste this week: Epoisse, Roquefort, Montgomerys’ Cheddar and Smoked Linconshire Poacher.

We started the evening in the reverse order of strength with Montgomerys’ Cheddar and learnt more about the UK’s Cheddar industry from Dan. Did you know that 70% of the cheese that we purchase in the UK is Cheddar… and ‘cheddaring’ is a verb? Our homework for the week had been to learn about ‘The Chill Chain’ - I won’t reveal the full answer in case you are reading and planning to study the course yourself, but the magic number to remember, and a very important one for the cheese industry is 8°C!

A few more Academy of Cheese technical terms were introduced this week around cheese ‘make and post-make’ types. These will help us classify the 25 cheeses that we are studying on the course.

Grouped into smaller breakout rooms in Zoom, we tasted through the four cheeses with our Academy of Cheese structured approach to cheese tasting notes. It was good to put into practice what we had learned from week one and it was particularly interesting to hear the different opinions of the group on the bolder cheeses; Epoisse and Roquefort. My group preferred tasting the Montgomerys’ Cheddar, Smoked Lincolnshire Poacher and Roquefort and we captured a lot of different complex flavours in these. In the Roquefort we detected ‘rancid butter, cream, toast, yeast, spice, pepper, smoke and sherry”. We didn’t enjoy so much the Epoisse, but that wasn’t the case for all of the breakout groups as some had Epoisse as a favourite.

Homework this week was a fun one – we were told the cheeses that we would be tasting next week and asked to prepare a suitable drink pairing for one of them. We can bring our drink with us to test out our proposed pairing! Another Paxton & Whitfield cheese delivery is due to arrive with us on Monday ready for the Wednesday evening session. More to follow next week...

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